this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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So material waste can be directly tied to cost. If you're trying to bring down cost then you're going to try to reduce waste correct? That's why there is so much work being done for reusable launch vehicles
For space debris and pollution I don't think we can squarely blame capitalism. Under a purely communist economy there's no guarentee that anyone would care any more about it than currently And you can attack that issue by a combination of penalising companies that create debris and rewarding those that remove it under a capitalist economy
As for it not being entirely comparable. Sure the government spent a lot of money on that early R&D. But do we think that if we banned companies from doing this kind of work that govt agencies like NASA would be necessarily more cost effective, cause less pollution, and less debris?
The overwhelming cost in these projects is always engineering salaries. These companies are making the calculation that they can throw shit (rockets) at the wall (into space) carelessly to save money by wasting more material to avoid paying the salaries of people that could think through the design more carefully and come up with something that will have a reasonable probability of working the first time.
Add this to the insurmountable pile of things we should theoretically regulate but never will because of regulatory capture.
Do you have any data to back that up? It would be quite interesting
I don't think regulation is impossible to achieve, look at the EU. And what I am fairly sure of is you have better odds of passing regulation than replacing capitalism entirely